Science for SEO

It's not a technical post and not full of maths and methods and things, it lists some cool uses for Twitter in IR systems.  The idea is that SMS can be used to get information such as order tracking, exchange rate conversions, etc...so can Twitter be used for the same thing?

One obvious issue is security, there have been some problems recently too.  I don't know how Twitter security works although I can have a guess.  I think it would need to be more robust.  The only person reading your SMS is you, on Twitter getting a DM is the equivalent maybe but...I'd want to see more evidence of good security before my bank sends me a DM telling me I have x amount of money in my bank account for example or something like that. Saad suggests universities being able to give you your term results via twitter too, I know a lot of students like to keep these to themselves.

I don't have any stats at hand but he says that people are sending less text messages and using Twitter more.  I'm not sure that's entirely right.  Please drop some stats through if you have them.  I know that I'm the only person in my family on Twitter, that a good percentage of my non-techy/internet friends don't know what it is, and that a good percentage of those that try it don't keep at it.  I think Twitter has quite some catching up to do still.

I love Saad's idea of paying for your Starbucks on Twitter but there would probably have to be a better infrastructure in place for you to type in “Pay @Starbucks48 $9.99” to @PaypalTwitter.  

Saad says that he thinks that Twitter should "build a platform that businesses can subscribe to facilitate these services" because of the API limit.  I think that there is a whole lot more to consider besides personal information handling such as how data can be sorted, stored and retrieved effectively.  Here we are talking of Twitter as a very different beast, and the technical challenges are not insurmountable in anyway but they are tricky.  

I guess we have to wait and see what the intentions of the Twitter boys are before we dream up any weird and wonderful things.  

Without further ado...

 “I see the the birth of artificial intelligence leading to increasingly snotty and patronizing personalities emerging via AI on the web to enhance our experience, just as they do in real life. At the moment it is difficult to imagine but over the next few years you are going to hear more and more about the Pedantic Web. It is a natural step in the evolution of the web towards Web 9.0 which we have named the Romantic Web. Eventually the web will contain and involve all of our relationships and connections, it will be our friend, our lover and our master.” (James Johnson - found on the no longer updated Science Faction blog)

Twitter -Taking it too far?

"A few Chirps about twitter" gives valuable insight into how we use the application and why we use it. 

It is a paper written by Balachander krishnamurthy (AT&T Labs), Phillipa Gill (Uni Calgary) and Martin Arlitt (HP Labs - Uni Calgary)

"Our goal is to characterize a novel communication network in depth, its user base and geographical spread, and compare results of different crawling techniques in the presence of constraints from a generic measurement point of view".

They gathered 3 datasets covering nearly 100,000 users.  Detailed information was gathered on each user and the list of users they were following.  They say that relationships in Twitter are directed but that there is no way of gathering the set of reverse links: information on the set of users following a user.  

They collected data at specific times of the day and extracted the users that posted at these times - they collected data from each user and a partial list of his/her followers.They gathered data for 3 weeks.

"During this process the median number of users followed by the previously crawled users, m, was tabulated. To further the crawl the first m users followed by the current user would be added to the set of users to crawl."

It focused on current active users who continually post a series of 20 or more updates.  Details were collected on each user

They used a Random walk with backtracking to collect the data.  They only considered once child of each node.

Broadcasters - They follow few but have a large number of followers

Acquaintances - they reciprocate the follow (so have an even spread of following-followers)

Miscreants - spammers or stalkers who contact everyone they can to get followers

61% use the web, 7,5% mobile, 7.2% IM, 1.2% Facebook, 22.4% custom applications

Highly popular users update their status very often, generally those with more than 250 followers updated a lot more often than others.

There is a lot more information and analysis present in the paper, give it a read, it's very accessible.

You may also want to collect information for your own purposes and for this you can write your own specialised Twitter bot from scratch or use a library provided by kind souls.

Google provide some help by providing an infrastructure for you.  Using this you only need to code the logic rather than the whole thing yourself.  It interacts with the Twitter API respecting the terms of service, and manages the enrollment of followers.  The twitter account acts as the bot.  It's built on the .Net 2.0 framework. 

There are other bot code resources available in Google code, here are some nice ones:

Python-Twitter - python wrapper for the Twitter API: allows people to connect via the web, IM, and SMS.

TwitterBroadcastBot - in Ruby - broadcasts a message whenever a friend update contains a certain word.  Good for info flagging.

ContactsNearby - ASP.Net & InSTEDD- allows you to find out the geographical location of your friends on Twitter.  Plugs into Facebook too.

MadCow - python - has a whole host of features for you to use like tracking bookmarks, ip lookup, and silly things like ASCII art and loads more.  

Nathan at Flowing data has a nice tutorial on how to build your own Twitter bot, take a look - he also provides some code to get you started.  

You can automate a lot of things using CRON.  You can use UNWIN if you're on windows and not Unix.  

For about a week, it stopped working and I could no longer add my presentations.  I'd begun to rely on it, and suddenly it was letting me down (it is in beta, so lets not be too harsh, and it is a free service!).    

I vented my frustration on Twitter saying something like "I will never use SlideShare again, it won't let me upload anything and I can't see where to contact anyone".  Within a few hours, SlideShare were following me and also asked what was wrong, how they could help and pointed me to their "contact us" link that I couldn't find.  I explained my issue via Twitter and they explained what the problem was.

What they achieved?

Me actually bothering to go back to try the service again, and when it still didn't work, I decided to leave it for a week and see how it goes then.  Without their Twitter intervention, I was a lost cause to them and their product.  

Obviously if it does never work again, I'll use a different service altogether, but the important thing is that they made me feel valued and understood.  I think a lot of companies should learn from just this one instance, and I know many like Dell already look after their customers and users this way, not to mention potential customers.

Time to get on board those of you who haven't yet!